The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (17 page)

So Mary returned to Scotland, to a country convulsed by the Protestant Reformation, which had there taken the character of a revolution. The historic Church had been overthrown, monasteries and churches sacked, Church property seized, the Mass outlawed, bishops abolished, and a Presbyterian form of Church government decreed. In August 1560 the Estates passed a series of acts in the name of the absent Queen, but without her authority. Like the Treaty of Leith, these acts, lacking Mary’s signature, might have been of dubious legality; but questions of legality yielded to revolutionary necessity.

The Estates also published a ‘Confession of Faith’, twenty-five articles defining correct religious belief and practices. Its author was John Knox. He had had a varied career since participating in the murder of Cardinal Beaton. Taken prisoner when the French stormed the castle of St Andrews, he had spent a year pulling an oar in a French galley. Released, he had made his way to England, where, in the reign of Edward VI, he was offered a bishopric, which he refused prudently, ‘in forewight’, as he later remarked, ‘of trouble to come’. When that trouble indeed arrived in the form of the Catholic reaction, he, prudently again, removed to Geneva, where he came under the influence of John Calvin. There, in what he described as ‘the most perfect schole of Christ’, he imbibed and accepted the doctrines of Predestination and the Elect, which were to be at the heart of Scotch Presbyterianism. It was from Geneva that in 1558 he delivered the pamphlet entitled
A First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
. This was not quite what it seems. ‘Regiment’ means ‘Rule’ and his attack was directed at Mary Tudor in England, Marie de Guise in Scotland and (perhaps) Catherine de Medici in France. In private life, Knox was no misogynist. Indeed, he rather liked women, and married twice, the second time when he was over fifty to a girl of fifteen, with whom he had three daughters.
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What he objected to was female government, all the more so because all three were Catholics, enemies of the Reformation to which he was now absolutely committed. This, however, was one occasion when his ‘forewight’ failed him. He had not considered that a Protestant queen might succeed Mary Tudor. Elizabeth was not amused by his trumpet-blast, and refused to allow him to return to England as he wished. So he came home to Scotland and in May 1559 preached an inflammatory sermon in Perth, which roused what his enemies described as ‘the rascal multitude’ to storm and sack the town’s monasteries and friaries.

Though guided by the Lords of the Congregation, the Reformation in Scotland was a popular movement. It was not, however, universally so – the north-east in particular remaining hostile and attached to the old ways and the Catholic faith for a long time – and its impact was not felt immediately all over the country. There are arguments as to how deep and widespread attachment to the cause of reform was. It was by no means certain in 1560 that it might not be reversed, as had happened in England when Mary Tudor became queen. The vehemence with which it was preached and the incitement of mobs may be taken, in part at least, as evidence of the nervousness and insecurity of the reformers.

Michael Lynch in his
History of Scotland
wrote:

For many people the Reformation is the central event of Scottish history; it was the point at which they can claim their birthright as a Protestant nation. For them, the Reformation was a kind of ‘big bang’ – everything happened overnight. In some places it did. In St Andrews, on 11 June, 1559, the citizens went to bed as Catholics and woke up as Protestants, because overnight the Lords of the Congregation – the Protestant army, with John Knox among them – had come into the town, had gone into the parish church and ripped down all the Catholic ornaments, whitewashed the walls and turned it into a Protestant church. The ‘big bang’ did not happen like that in many places.
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Nevertheless, it is undeniable that a great part of Lowland Scotland enthusiastically welcomed the rejection of Rome and embraced the reformed religion with fervent zeal. Mary was apprised of this before she returned to Scotland. On the one hand, the Catholic Earl of Huntly, chief of the great Aberdeenshire family of Gordon, came to her in Paris offering to raise an army of 20,000 men (a boast he could not have made good) to restore the kingdom to proper order and true religion. On the other, her half-brother, Lord James Stewart,
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advised her to tread warily and to practise discretion. Her Guise uncles, though eager to see Scotland return to the French alliance, counselled likewise, the Cardinal even going so far as to suggest that she might be wise to make a show of Protestantism, at the very least to declare her intention of making no attempt at counter-revolution. This advice was in tune with Mary’s own temper, which was essentially mild and generous.

Mary arrived in Scotland on 19 August 1561. If Knox is to be believed,

the very face of heaven…did manifestly speak what comfort was brought into this country with her, to wit, sorrow, dolor, darkness, and all impiety; for in the memory of man, that day of the year has never seen a more dolorous face of the heaven, than was at her arrival, which two days after did so continue; for, besides the surface wet, and corruption of the air, the mist was so thick and dark, that scarce might any man espy another the length of two butts; the sun was not seen to shine two days before, nor two days after. That forewarning God gave unto us, but alas the most part were blind…
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Few acquainted with the vagaries of a Scottish August will be as certain as Knox that the foul weather that greeted Mary on her return to Scotland was intended by the Almighty as ‘forewarning’ that she was bringing ‘sorrow, dolor, darkness, and all impiety’ to her kingdom.

In fact, even Knox admits that her arrival was greeted with general joy, but he does so to point the contrast, to show how deluded they were, and then how short a time their joy lasted. Mary, while offering no challenge to the reformers, was determined that she should still worship according to the rites of the Roman Church. The news that Mass was to be celebrated in the royal chapel had men asking, if again Knox’s account is to be trusted, ‘Shall that idol be suffered again to take place within this realm?’; and supplying the answer, ‘It shall not.’ A demonstration threatened to turn into a riot, with calls for ‘the idolatrous priests’ to be put to death. At that moment, however, Lord James Stewart, ‘the man whom all the godly did most reverence’, intervened to guard the chapel door.

The riot may have been spontaneous; again it may not. Lord James may have acted out of respect and regard for his half-sister, the Queen; or he may have staged the whole thing to demonstrate that she must rely on him, that indeed she would find it impossible to govern without his advice and assistance. Mary took the hint, and soon created him Earl of Moray.

Moray, eldest son of James V and his mistress Margaret Erskine, was now a man of thirty, ten years older than his half-sister. He was a sincere convert to the reformed religion and an astute politician. He was in his way a patriot who believed in the desirability, even necessity, of the alliance with England, which alone could safeguard the Reformation; but he was also in English pay. He may have had an affection for Mary, but, resenting his own illegitimacy, he could not but think he would have made a better king than she a queen. He looked like a Stewart king, tall, dark, serious of expression and mind, and some suspected he had designs on the throne. In 1559 Mary’s father-in-law, Henry II, shortly before his death, had commissioned the Constable of France to send Sir James Melville (later Mary’s ambassador to the English court) back to Scotland to report on whether there was any truth in rumours that Lord James intended to supplant Mary, then still in France, and seize the crown for himself. Melville’s report suggested the rumours were unfounded. He was probably right. Lord James was loyal to Mary, as long as her wishes coincided with his interests, and for a few years she would be guided by his advice.

The Queen’s other chief councillor was her secretary – in modern terminology, secretary of state – William Maitland of Lethington, an intellectual whose intelligence provoked both admiration and distrust. (Some called him ‘Mitchell Wyllie’, a Scots corruption of Machiavelli.) In concert with Maitland and Moray, Mary pursued a prudent policy of conciliation. She had tacitly accepted the doubtfully legal Acts of the Reformation Parliament, which had outlawed the Mass, and when in 1562 the Catholic Earl of Huntly staged a rebellion, which had the intention of reversing the religious changes, she not only suppressed it, but rode with her troops, winning their admiration by her energy, grace and cheerfulness.

Knox, however, was irreconcilable. ‘If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an indurate heart against God and his truth, my judgement faileth me.’
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He and Mary debated matters of religion on several occasions, at length, and by Knox’s account he invariably had the better of her. Her version of the argument might have been different. He boasted of having reduced her to angry tears on at least one occasion, which did not greatly disturb him, ‘seeing as I have offered unto you no just occasion to be offended, but I have spoken the truth, as my vocation craves’.
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Nevertheless, no matter how offended she might have been, Mary continued to pursue the middle way, one of tolerance, unusual, indeed scarcely known, in that time. This, however, was not a quality to commend itself to Knox and his fellow True Believers. Tolerance was laxity and laxity was sin, a defiance of the Word of God as interpreted by Knox.

The other immediate and important question concerned her marriage. Nobody supposed that she could govern effectively without the support of a husband, and she was herself eager to marry again and produce an heir to ensure the future of the dynasty. Elizabeth of England would remain unmarried – or, as she remarked, married only to her country. Her ability to hold out the prospect of a marriage was a valuable diplomatic card. Moreover, she was by nature reluctant to commit herself completely to any course of action and was indeed, to the reiterated anger of her ministers, constitutionally indecisive. But Mary seems never to have contemplated remaining single, and Elizabeth took a close interest in her choice. This was reasonable if she was ever to accede to her cousin’s request that she be named as her heir. Whoever Mary married might one day be King of England. That ruled out any foreign Roman Catholic prince – in Elizabeth’s opinion anyway.

There was one Scottish candidate, the young Earl of Arran, head of the House of Hamilton. He had been proposed as a possible husband when they were both young children, in the days when his father was governor and was being guided by Cardinal Beaton. Indeed, he had been taken to France with the little Queen in 1548. His father, who had been rewarded for turning against the Treaty of Greenwich with French lands and a French title (Duke of Chatelherault), continued to promote the match, and there was certainly a suggestion that if something happened to prevent the marriage of Mary and the Dauphin, then young Arran would be considered as a future husband. He had a ring that Mary had given him and that he believed was a token of her agreement, and as soon as Francis died he sent it back to Mary to remind her of the promise he thought she had made. Meanwhile, however, Arran had also been paying suit to Elizabeth. Disappointed of both queens, the young man, always nervous, highly strung and erratic, became mad. In 1562 he was placed in confinement, where he would remain, outliving most of his contemporaries, till he died in 1609.

Elizabeth had her own candidate for the position of the Scotch queen’s husband: Robert Dudley, whom she had created Earl of Leicester. This might be considered a generous, even selfless, offer, for the world believed that Leicester had been, perhaps still was, her own lover. Worse than that, it was also believed, probably falsely, that he had disposed of his wife, Amy Robsart, in order to free himself to marry Elizabeth. (Amy had died by falling downstairs – the story is at the heart of Scott’s novel
Kenilworth
– but rumour had it she had been pushed by her husband’s command.)

Mary regarded the suggestion that she should marry Dudley as an insult. Not only was she being offered Elizabeth’s leavings – her discarded lover – but worse still, Dudley was a parvenu. His grandfather, Edmund Dudley, had been a mere lawyer, one of Henry VII’s ministers – executed by Henry VIII in a popular gesture as soon as he came to the throne. Then, though Robert Dudley’s father John had become in succession Earl of Warwick, Duke of Northumberland and Lord Protector of England during the reign of Edward VI, he too had been executed as a traitor, having attempted to subvert the succession by putting Henry VII’s great-granddaughter, Lady Jane Grey (conveniently married to one of Northumberland’s sons), on the throne instead of Mary Tudor. So though it was no disgrace to die on the scaffold in Tudor England, the Dudleys were a disreputable lot; and Robert Dudley quite unacceptable to Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Dowager of France.

Mary must look elsewhere. She cast her eye about and it lighted on a tall, good-looking boy a couple of years her junior. He was called Henry, Lord Darnley, and he was, she said, ‘the lustiest and best proportioned long man’ she had ever seen.

Darnley was a cousin of both queens. His mother, Margaret Douglas, was the daughter of Margaret Tudor by her second marriage to the Earl of Angus. So Mary and Darnley shared a grandmother. Since Margaret Tudor was also Elizabeth’s aunt, Margaret Douglas was the English queen’s first cousin and she stood at one further remove of cousinship from the boy. Margaret Douglas was married to Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, who was himself a descendant of James II. Lennox had been living in England for some twenty years, since taking the English side in the last years of Henry VIII’s reign, and young Darnley was more of an Englishman than a Scot. He had a claim also to the English throne, though it was a doubtful one, since in his will Henry VIII had excluded the descendants of his sister Margaret from the succession.